IMO, HF quality is not that good. Basically its what you used to buy at car shows, swap meets, etc. Typical made off shore stuff. That being said, most everything has gone that way now. Unless you are going to spend boku dollars on SnapOn or MAC tools there's really no reason not to buy from HF. Even Craftsman stuff is spotty now. Tools are just another example of how our society has transitioned from buying something for life to having a throw away mentality about just about everything. Remember when there used to be TV repair shops? There's no point anymore. The boards are so small that a human can't repair them anymore, a replacement board is likely not available, and if it is its cheaper to buy a new TV than it is to diagnose and fix the old one, while waiting two weeks for the part to get there. Even cars have gone this way. I remember marveling at how Mercedes were built, because the cars were always expensive, but before the '00s you actually got value for that money. Everything was designed to be either serviceable, or to essentially never wear out. That's why its not uncommon to see older Mercedes with 200k, 300k, or more on the clock and still be on the road. At some point though they got greedy (I blame the Chrysler merger) and decided that their marque was all people were spending that money to get, and the quality of the car didn't matter, because the first owner would just trade it in on a new one in a couple years before it started to fall apart if they just built their cars like everyone else.
I buy plenty of stuff form HF, and I use my tools fairly hard. I bought a set of wrenches for my garage thinking "I'll only use them occasionally, so the quality doesn't really matter". I think I paid $15 each for a set of inch and a set of metric combo wrenches. I've since done a set of head gaskets on my Subaru and my T5 swap in my Mustang with those wrenches, and they're still perfect. I have on of their shapers I use almost exclusively to grind metal that I've had for probably a decade or more. The drive belt failed, but I went online, used the number off the belt and bought 4 new belts for $20, which should be enough to last me forever. Pretty sure that shaper cost $60 on sale. My air angle grinder just died after about a decade, so I had to pony up another $20 for a new one.
Yeah, all in, I lament that tools aren't built the way they used to be, but HF makes it cheap to own a ton of tools, and given what they cost, and the fact that they do last a lot longer than you'd think; I don't even get mad when one finally lets go. Over the years I've broken plenty of Craftsman or other "quality" tools. The lifetime replacement was a great selling point, but in the end I can buy a HF tool 3-5 times for the cost of a name brand tool, with less up front cost. HF also has most specialty automotive tools, and its hard to argue with owning vs. renting/borrowing things like a ball joint press, etc.
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